


Leave

by Chickenwriter



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-21 14:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6055306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chickenwriter/pseuds/Chickenwriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She didn’t leave. She was just...gone.</p><p>Possible revival spoilers</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave

She didn’t really take the time to leave.

There was no grand moment of goodbye. 

No warning. 

No screeching of tires on the road. 

No slammed door.

No last kiss. 

No “Take care” scrawled in her lazy handwriting on the dining room table.

She simply went to work in the early hours and never came home. 

He called Maggie and found she was there. And, she refused to come to the phone. 

She sat instead with her head in her hands at the kitchen counter; tears refusing to spring to her eyes – yet her whole body convulsed as if she were sobbing. This wasn’t the first time she had left. Every other time, she knew in her heart that her return was imminent. This time she knew she had no plan of returning, and it was that finality that broke her.  
Maggie made multiple pots of tea, replacing her daughter’s cup every time it sat untouched and became cold. She didn’t know what else to do. 

He knew it wasn’t one thing that he did, it was his whole personality that made her run. His depression and obsessive tendencies had, at one time, been endearing – or at the very least, tolerable - but now, in the end of their prime, he couldn’t ask her to live with his issues: not when he refused to work on them. 

The last thing he said to her was something he had said a thousand times. They’d had another argument about his medication laying untouched on the counter. He didn’t want the numbness they caused to be his default mood. She didn’t want his outbursts to be something she had to deal with on a daily basis. But his stubborn nature let dust gather on the bottles. He wished his last words had been “I love you.”

Sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night. His fists would ball up the sheets and eventually they would end in a heap on the floor. He would be yelling, or crying, about whatever was currently eating away at the brain she once admired. She held him close to her until they stopped. Sometime they made love until they both forgot, and other times they would collapse from exhaustion. She hadn’t slept through the night since their commencement, except for a brief period of time when he actually took the pills.  
Other times he would yell, not usually at her, but he would stop to curse the sky in the middle of typing up his memories of their time working on the files. 

He lived in that office as she tried to draw him out and back into the real world. And the office is where he sat now, as it was the only place where she hadn’t spent her time. It was the only place without pervasive memories of the love of his life. When his tears finally came, he felt they wouldn’t stop. A life without Scully was a life he did not want to live. Yet, Mulder found in himself a new obsession: proving that he was okay without her, mostly so she would come home to a man ready to support her in the way she deserved. In the midst of his biggest breakdown, he paused to take his pills and organize his office. Maybe, if he put his home together, she would find it livable. 

Scully sat at the counter for 4 hours, unwavering. When she finally moved – it was to curl up on the couch. She had to work in the morning, but considered calling in to the hospital. Of course that meant that her major surgery would have to be assigned to a different surgeon, and she didn’t trust anyone to properly deal with her patients. She cursed herself softly for thinking of her responsibilities before she even tried to sift through the feelings she’d endured for the last few decades of her life. 

A younger Dana would have mourned the loss of any chance at a normal home. Now she mourned the loss of the only man who ever challenged her to question everything. While she still wished that she were raising their child, and living in a lovely neighborhood – she had faith that things worked out how they should. Her faith was shaken when her body drove her to her mother’s rather than home to him.


End file.
